Automatic Plant Watering System in Mumbai

Through the dry season, the timer runs on a fixed daily schedule, since almost no rain falls to supplement it and a missed day shows up in wilting within a day or two on a hot balcony or terrace.

Once the monsoon sets in, we fit a rain sensor or simply switch the timer to a manual override, since running a daily drip cycle on top of a month that can bring over 470 mm of rain would waterlog beds that need to dry out, not more water.

An advantage in the water itself

Mumbai's municipal water is drawn from the Bhatsa, Vaitarna and Tansa dams in Thane district and is comparatively soft, which means drip emitters here clog with mineral scale more slowly than in cities that rely on harder groundwater.

Even with softer water, we still fit a simple filter at the tap, since sediment in older building plumbing, more than water hardness, is the more common cause of a blocked emitter in this city.

A system built for the region's temperature range

Fittings and tubing exposed on an open balcony or terrace face daytime highs in the mid-thirties through May and June and, rarely, temperatures that have touched the low forties in the city's recorded past, so we specify UV-stabilised tubing rather than standard piping that can turn brittle after a couple of summers in direct sun.

The same fittings then sit through months of near-constant humidity once the monsoon arrives, so connectors and joints are checked at the annual service for the kind of slow corrosion that shows up in a humid coastal climate rather than the cracking a dry climate would cause instead.